Post #114 I typed CEN - meant to be Centrica which is CNA. Same as mentioned at end of previous post.
A few pointers if you want to retire soon, and are suitable: (cos if you aren't you'll lose your shirt).
If you want to simply buy some shares, there's a small number of cheap platforms which make it easy.
Once you're using the platform, you start to find out how some of them are up-front with where they make their money, and work reliably.
There are too many details for me to go through, and I only know anything about a few of platforms, but low fees I'm assuming are a priority.
Most brokers (ie banks, Hargreaves Landsdown) charge a fee for buying shares. HL's is £12, cheapest bank is £5 iirc.
Freeish, are eToro, Freetrade and Trading212.
To have an account with real money in it, you will have to prove your identity - photo of you and your driving license, etc.
But you should be able to use a Demo account with just a name and email.
The "demo" or "paper" accounts are meant to mirror everything you would have on a real-money account. Some, eg Trading 212's, doesn't.
eToro is over-promoted but it has a lot going for it. Freetrade, you might find a bit too simple soon after starting, and there's no demo account, but it works OK.
Some people make a big deal of whether you're getting "actual" shares or the platform is using their own money but making things LOOK as though you have actual shares. Bottom line, it doesn't matter. You still have up to £85k FCSC protection. Almost all of all tradng on forex, stocks, and most other things - trillions per day - is using a proxy of some sort.
If you want to manage the shares at all, you'll want to sell sometimes, then rebuy. You don't want a 10% drop to cost you 10%.
There are "spreads" (buy-sell differences), exchange fees (eg GBP to USD) and some others. Even when they sorta hide them, but they can be very tiny.
If you use Trading212, you'll have the 0.5% tax to pay on UK stocks. Not so with eToro. The spread's wider but less than 0.5% different.
An important thing with Trading212 is that you cannot set a Trailing-Stop-Loss, which is an automated sell-on-drop.
A TLS is a price which is based on the highest a stock gets to. It might be say -1%. So if your £100 stock hits say £150, the TLS follows it, and would be at 148.50. If the price drops, a sale happens for you. Peaks usually "fade" back down. Up to you to buy again, but you can set a price in advance. (Some will say it can gap past the 148.50 - very unusual and you can "insure" against it if you want, with eToro).
SO if the price is back at £110 you feel smug with eToro, and sad with the other two. True, it might go down to £110 then up to 200, but if you'd reacted to your Alert you could probably have rebought at £120 or better.
If you only want to ONLY use UK stocks (not advised) then you have to convert to USD anyway with eToro, but the exchange rate is low and you only do it to fund the account, not on every trade. They do a have a £5 withdrawal fee, which is what it is.
Trading212 has other problems which may get you eventually. The platform has loads of snags, and it's just tough if one catches you - you lose. I noticed three complaints which popped up in their meagre forum, then vanished. One was about following the instruction from their FAQ, which turned out to be incorrect. Customer lost a lot of money in fees.
I stopped using them months ago.
I now use more sophisticated sources . Loads of features, such as Alerting you if a given stock rises above 1% over the bottom of a one-week moving average, which would indicate a good time to buy.
If you wanna learn more, one link - go to
https://www.trade-ideas.com . It's run by a very competent set of people. They have an expensive monthly product which is hugely popular - not recommended for a beginner , but loads of educational ebooks and videos too. And you get a look into what you can use if you want to get serious.
A site with a load of facilities which starts free and is only for charting, not the actual dealing, is TradingView.
Warning - if you're the sort who acts on impulse or just to try it, you will lose.
If you learn a bit and make a list of (about 4) things to consider and always do it, you'll win 3 out of 4 and only lose small on the 4th.
If you do the learning and are highly selective - my approach, you win 9 out of 10. Never ever expose yourself to a risk of about 2% of whatever your "pot" is. I would say learn the mechanics with a demo account, then move to real money after that "bit" of learning, with tiny quantities.
You will make mistakes and have things go wrong.
If I sat down casually doing small trades I could eg easily win a three or five units of money many times in a row, but then I'd lose focus or be a bit rash and lose ten. I can tell you when those are thousands or more, a stoic attitude is needed, not to get cross.